If you have some proof of astroturfing you should write a blog and then share on hn, it might make for a very good post here. otherwise it feels wildly inappropriate (not to mention incredibly unlikely that they would spend marketing money on astroturfing here of all places). Andy Weir has written some books that are incredibly successful in the tech industry circles with Hail Mary being the current most popular if not slightly under The Martian, chances are there's just going to be a lot of talk about it. But even if there is astroturfing, telling people to not watch the movie in a thread where someone is showing off their space photography is inappropriate and misplaced.
The author of the great Astrophotography is not the OP of the HN post.
And that is already one starting and possible isolated indicator of astroturfing, ....when the movie related posts got no traction, they went looking for related subjects...
Under the assumption that amazon has decided to astroturf on this niche tech news site, that is still okay and allowed to do as long as the article provided is interesting. There are countless posts here which are just blogs from various companies, sometimes posted here by the companies themselves. Meta, Apple, small startups, movie companies, whatever. It's all allowed here as long as the content posted has substance and is interesting, thats all. What's important is that the comments are productive and interesting and not being used as a soapbox, which is likely why your parent comment is negatively voted. There are countless platforms for you to suggest others not see a movie, but a hn post about astrophotography is not that.
>> Under the assumption that amazon has decided to astroturf on this niche tech news site
Even Microsoft astroturfs here...
Satya Nadella, Microsoft FY2019 Q1 earnings call [1]:
“In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress..."
there is a stark difference between a division aimed at developers attempting to astroturf on a tech industry (mostly developer) news aggregator and a movie studio.
>> It’s about friendship and loneliness and the fragility of the human experience and the triumph of the human spirit!
So is every Disney movie and that is what this but with the crappy Amazon Studios take on it.
>> Anyways, everybody’s a critic these days,
Do you believe a movie can objectively be considered good or bad? If you do you then believe some are better critics than others, the same some way some are better Coders than others or better Basketball players than others?
You're asking the wrong person lol. I can give you a list of "objectively bad" movies that I think are incredible for a variety of defensible reasons.
Just off the top of my head as I briefly scan shit sitting on the shelves of my office:
- Joe Dirt
- Death Wish 3
- Thrashin
- Hackers
- Mortal Kombat
- Uncle Buck
- The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
- Tapeheads
- Prayer of the Rollerboys
- Weekend at Bernie's
Not exactly Fellini, and some are barely even Andy Sidaris if we're being honest, but every movie in that list is amazing for different reasons. An objective critique of any of them (especially in context with "film", as a shapeless, vague concept) misses the point and the spirit of each and every one. But I am an uncultured heathen, so ...
Reddit aviation groups are full of professional pilots, saying how terrified they of flying into La Guardia or JFK, recounting close calls, with one saying how he avoided those two for 10 years...
>> Software routinely solves database coordination problems with millions of users per second.
A naive view that confuses the map with the territory.
While in a database state you write a row and reality updates atomically....for aircraft they exist in a physical world where your model lives with lag, noise, and lossy sensors, and that world keeps moving whether your software is watching or not. Failed database transactions roll back, a landing clearance issued against stale state does not. The hard problem in ATC is not coordination logic but physical objects with momentum, human agency, and failure modes that do not respect your consistency model.
"The unsettling reality is that with this president, Americans in wartime are in the unprecedented position of having to suspect that the enemy’s version of events is more likely to be true than our own."
When you complain about having to interact with AI when applying for a job, remember that AI could be the most fair and unbiased recruiter...as long as companies want to...
Great reaction time from the Waymo. But a 50 km/h side impact in a 5 star crash-rated Jaguar with curtain airbags is not "saved my life" territory, more
like an insurance claim. The fact that you instinctively framed it as a near-death experience is Waymo most impressive engineering achievement.
Azure security has been a joke since like ever. Its incredible how they managed to start from scratch, and still brought into their Cloud, the same issues they had in Windows since inception. Only Cloud to have not one, but two security events, that broke isolation barriers between tenants...
This Musk guy makes Ponzi look like the Pope.You almost have to admire
it the way you admire a raccoon breaking into a triple locked trash can at 2 AM.
You are furious. You know you should be furious. But part of you is at
the window wondering "how did he do that?". As you will see below,
this raccoon is getting the trash can manufacturer
to remove the lock for him first.
This is how retail investors are about to get played by the SpaceX IPO:
First they only release 5% to 10% to create an artificially inflated price.
Its called the low float strategy...
Also...the Nasdaq 100 inclusion is supposed to be earned. You list, trade for up to a year at least, prove you are stable and then maybe you might be selected for inclusion. That rule protects the millions of people whose retirement money is in index funds.
But Musk told Nasdaq "fast-track me or I list on NYSE... so the Nasdaq
invented a "Fast Entry" rule out of thin air....15 trading days and you are in.
They openly admitted it was designed for SpaceX. S&P is now considering the same
thing for the S&P 500, which has around $24 trillion in assets tracking it.
Why does this matter? The second SpaceX hits these indexes, every passive fund
is forced to buy, your 401k, your Vanguard fund, your target date fund.
All buying SpaceX at whatever inflated price it opens at, with zero public track record. Nobody asks you.
With the index inclusion and the implication of massive institutional liquidity
you have a clean exit for the insiders. After lockup expires, Musk and early investors dump the artificiality rarefied shares (it seems only 5% to 10%)
into a pool of demand that was artificially created by forced passive buying.
Your retirement money is their exit liquidity. Madoff went to prison for funneling new investor money to pay old investors. This is funneling passive investor money to inflate the price so insiders can cash out.And the exchange itself is rewriting the rules to make it happen.
Not saying anything positive about Musk, but what is the expected IPO price (I’m more curious about the alleged market cap)? If this scheme allows them to IPO at a valuation of $10T, I would be upset. If the valuation was something like $500B to $1T, that actually seems somewhat reasonable and likely to return value long-term as they are the clear leaders of space (for the time being at least).
The saving grace of the SP500 and most similar indexes is that they are cap-weighted. So if SpaceX only, floats 5% only that 5% of their capitalization counts for index calculation.
The Nasdaq100 is more complicated. SpaceX's 5% would be counted as about 25% of their total market cap for indexing.
It's worse than that, because S&P500 and Nasdaq100 share stocks. Like all of the MAG7 stocks. So if mag7 stocks dip because they're being structurally sold to buy SpaceX, then the S&P500 goes down too.
Arguably even worse because at least Nasdaq100 would have SpaceX in it that's getting bid up to offset the losses in other stocks. S&P won't have SpaceX right away. So it just goes down.
And the more those stocks go down, the lower their market cap - which means next rebalancing date they potentially get re-weighted again causing a bit more selling, etc. Presumably the companies that can will counter this with more buy-backs to keep their share price propped at an acceptable level (?).
From your description it sounds like they could offer SpaceX at a valuation of $10T and be able to still sell because every passive fund is automatically forced to buy it. But obviously they need to target a price range that will be more or less stable, otherwise even in 15 days the price will free fall anyway. The only question is whether 15 days is enough to find a stable price or not, I agree it sounds rushed.
I don't get it. He owns some of the companies out right and has no problem securing financing. Who is he screwing over?
> First they only release 5% to 10% to create an artificially inflated price. Its called the low float strategy...
Why would you float more than you reasonably would need. What's the upside of saying "we're worth X" due to a low float? Doesn't really buy you anything. And financiers are not stupid. Much the same way you can't create a shitcoin, sell one share to your buddy and convince a bank to lend you based on the "full" market cap
> the Nasdaq 100 inclusion is supposed to be earned. You list, trade for up to a year at least, prove you are stable and then maybe you might be selected for inclusion
Not really. Nasdaq and all indexes are supposed to serve as an index of largest companies in the country. It's not a prize that you have to "earn". Not including this company would be activism and against their mission.
> But Musk told Nasdaq "fast-track me or I list on NYSE... so the Nasdaq invented a "Fast Entry" rule out of thin air..
Yeah, it's called competition. You have a choice of where to list. This is how a healthy competitive environment works. Again, who is being harmed? Why is there a "Slow Entry"? No justification for bureaucratic hoop jumping.
> Why does this matter? The second SpaceX hits these indexes, every passive fund is forced to buy, your 401k, your Vanguard fund, your target date fund. All buying SpaceX at whatever inflated price it opens at, with zero public track record. Nobody asks you.
You found a cheat code! Create a company that's generating ~15b in revenue, has a >50% profit margin and ~50% revenue annual growth rate. Now you get to list your stock publicly, let the exchanges compete for your listing considering very few public large companies grow anywhere close to that, and force large indexes to buy you because, by this point you created one of the most valuable companies in the world!
15B in revenue is less than what AirPods sell in 6 months.
It's less revenue than Spotify.
It's nowhere near what should be necessary for a company to be "one one the most valuable companies in the world."
Elon knows this. He knows that the 1.5 T "valuation" is nonsense. The market for space launches is quite simply not that big. How many more Starlinks does the world need? What would you do if I gifted you a satellite?
The SpaceX valuation is predicted on hype for scientifically & economically illiterate ideas like "data centers in space."
Elon knows this. He knows that these indexing rules are the only way to keep the hype going and avoid a space-WeWork failed IPO.
Agree that 15b in revenue is not a lot. Finance has always been about future growth with majority of companies value well out into the future. And this company is growing at around 50% and has insane margins. They dominate their space with overwhelming majority of global launches. So a high multiple is justified imo
Yeah, you’ve shown it’s great to be a billionaire. Slow-clap. What you’re conveniently skirting around is all the little people’s retirement savings being transferred to the billionaires by artificially forcing the price high.
I think those boomer firms are asleep at the wheel and this kind of market engineering will completely blindside them. Vanguard can't even figure out how to show me my cost basis on the same screen as the one where I sell a security. What could they possibly be doing to prepare for this?
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